TOPOGRAPHICAL
would be hard to explain. He would ask me with a certain singularity of manner for "Orion," and I should not find him; for the Great Bear, and it would have vanished. "Where?" I should ask, and "where?" seeking among that scattered starriness, and slowly I should acquire the wonder that possessed him.
Then, for the first time perhaps, we should realise from this unfamiliar heaven that not the world had changed, but ourselves—that we had come into the uttermost deeps of space.
§ 5
We need suppose no linguistic impediments to intercourse. The whole world will surely have a common language, that is quite elementarily Utopian; and since we are free of the trammels of convincing story-telling, we may suppose that language to be sufficiently our own to understand. Indeed, should we be in Utopia at all if we could not talk to everyone? That accursed bar of language, that hostile inscription in the foreigner's eyes, "deaf and dumb to you, sir, and so—your enemy," is the very first of the defects and complications one has fled the earth to escape.
But what sort of language would we have the world speak, if we were told the miracle of Babel was presently to be reversed?
If I may take a daring image, a medieval liberty, I would suppose that in this lonely place the Spirit of Creation spoke to us on this matter. "You are wise men," that Spirit might say—and I, being a suspi-
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